recruit-quota.[1] Between 250 and 300 the "colonus" became legally bound to the soil (adscriptus glebæ). And with that the differentiation of feudal lord and vassal as class and class[2] was reached.
Every new Culture has potentially its nobility and its priesthood. The apparent exceptions to this are due merely to the absence to tangible tradition. We know to-day that a real priesthood existed in ancient China[3] and we may assume as self-evident that there was a priest-estate in the beginnings of Orphism in the eleventh century B.C. — the more confidently as we have plain indications of it in the epic figures of Calchas and Tiresias. Similarly the development of the feudal constitution in Egypt presupposes a primitive nobility as early as the IIIrd Dynasty.[4] But the form in which, and the force with which, these Estates first realized themselves and then took charge of the course of history — shaped it, carried it, and even represented it in their own destinies — depend upon the Prime-symbol on which each individual Culture, with its entire form-language, is based.
The nobility, wholly plantlike, proceeds everywhere from the land, which is its primary property and with which it is fast bound. It possesses everywhere the basic form of the family, the gens (in which, therefore, the "other" gender of history, the feminine, is expressed also), and it manifests itself through the will-to-duration — duration, namely, of the blood — as the great symbol of Time and History. It will appear that the early officialdom of the vassal state, based on personal trustworthiness, everywhere — in China and Egypt, in the Classical and the Western World[5] — goes through the same development, first creating quasi-feudal court offices and dignities, then seeking hereditary connexion with the soil, and so finally becoming the origin of noble family-lines.
The Faustian will-to-infinity comes to expression in the genealogical principle, which — strange as it may seem — is peculiar to this Culture. And in this Culture, moreover, it intimately permeates and moulds all the historical forms, and supremely those of the states themselves. The historical sense that insists upon getting to know the destinies of its own blood backwards through the centuries and seeing archival proofs of dates and provenances up to the first
- ↑ Thus, later, under Justinian, Belisarius could furnish seven thousand cavalry from his own domains for the Gothic War. Very few German princes could have done so much in Charles V's time. [The last of such armies in Western history was the army of the House of Condé in the seventeenth century. These centuries of ours "correspond" with the period that set in with Justinian. — Tr.]
- ↑ Pöhlmann, Röm. Kaiserzeit (Pflugk-Harttungs Weltgesch., I, pp. 200, et seq.).
- ↑ See p. 286.
- ↑ In spite of Ed. Meyer (Gesch. d. Altertums, I, § 143).
- ↑ Our marshal and the Chinese sse-ma, chamberlain and Chen, high steward and ta-tsai, high bailiff and nan, earl and peh (the Chinese ranks as in Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, p. 61, et seq.). Precisely corresponding Egyptian grades in Ed. Meyer, Gesch. des Altertums, I, § 222; Byzantine in the "Notitia Dignitatum" (derived in part from the Sassanid Court). In the Classical city-states certain official titles of ancient origin suggest court functions (Colacretæ, Prytanes, Consuls). See further below.
